Is there a setting in hair particles to make flat planes face the camera?
What you might want to do, is set your hair particle system to advanced, and enable Rotation in your particle settings, set your Particle Orientation axis(under Initial Orientation) to Normal, that should make all of the hair face up as away from the sphere's faces.



Other than that, if it still doesn't work, try enabling Rotation under your render tab, and rotating the planes until they line up with the sphere.

Note, this won't make the planes face directly toward the camera, but it should make them face the correct direction, which would give nearly the same result.